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United States General Accounting Office
GAO Testimony
Before the Subcommittee on VA, HUD, and Independent
Agencies, Committee on Appropriations, U.S. Senate
To Be Released
at 9:30 a.m., EDT,
Thursday
ENVIRONMENTAL
April 29, 1999
PROTECTION
Status of EPA’s Efforts to
Create a Central
Information Office
Statement for the Record by
Peter F. Guerrero
Director, Environmental Protection Issues,
Resources, Community, and Economic
Development Division
GAO/T-RCED-99-177
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:
We appreciate the opportunity to present this statement for the record,
which discusses our preliminary observations based on our ongoing work
for this Subcommittee concerning the Environmental Protection Agency’s
(EPA) information management initiatives. Specifically, this statement
provides information on (1) the status of EPA’s efforts to create a central
office responsible for information management, policy, and technology
issues and (2) the major challenges that the new office needs to address in
order to achieve success in collecting, using, and disseminating
environmental information. Our final report will be provided in
August 1999.
EPA estimates that its central information office will be operational by the
end of August 1999 and will have a staff of about 350 employees. The
office will address a broad range of information policy and technology
issues, such as improving the accuracy of EPA’s data, protecting the
security of information that EPA disseminates over the Internet, developing
better measures to assess environmental conditions, and reducing
information collection and reporting burdens. EPA recognizes the
importance of developing an information plan showing the goals of the
new office and the means by which they will be achieved but has not yet
established milestones or target dates for completing such a plan.
Although EPA has made progress in determining the organizational
structure for the new office, it has not yet finalized decisions on the
office’s authorities, responsibilities, and budgetary needs. Nor has the
agency performed an analysis to determine the types and the skills of
employees that will be needed to carry out the office’s functions. EPA
officials told us that decisions on the office’s authorities, responsibilities,
budget, and staff will be made before the office is established in
August 1999.
On the basis of our prior and ongoing reviews of EPA’s information
management problems, we believe that the success of the new office
depends on the agency’s addressing several key challenges as it develops
an information plan, budget, and organizational structure for that office.
Most importantly, EPA needs to (1) provide the office with the resources
and the expertise necessary to solve the complex information
management, policy, and technology problems facing the agency;
(2) empower the office to overcome organizational challenges to adopting
agencywide information policies and procedures; (3) balance the agency’s
need for data on health, the environment, and program outcomes with the
Page 1 GAO/T-RCED-99-177
call from the states and regulated industries to reduce their reporting
burdens; and (4) work closely with its state partners to design and
implement improved information management systems.
In October 1998, the EPA Administrator announced plans to create an
Background office with responsibility for information management, policy, and
technology. This announcement came after many previous efforts by EPA
to improve information management and after a long history of concerns
that we, the EPA Inspector General, and others have expressed about the
agency’s information management activities. Such concerns involve the
accuracy and completeness of EPA’s environmental data, the fragmentation
of the data across many incompatible databases, and the need for
improved measures of program outcomes and environmental quality.
The EPA Administrator described the new office as being responsible for
improving the quality of information used within EPA and provided to the
public and for developing and implementing the goals, standards, and
accountability systems needed to bring about these improvements. To this
end, the information office would (1) ensure that the quality of data
collected and used by EPA is known and appropriate for its intended uses,
(2) reduce the burden of the states and regulated industries to collect and
report data, (3) fill significant data gaps, and (4) provide the public with
integrated information and statistics on issues related to the environment
and public health. The office would also have the authority to implement
standards and policies for information resources management and be
responsible for purchasing and operating information technology and
systems.
Under a general framework for the new office that has been approved by
Progress Is Being the EPA Administrator, EPA officials have been working for the past several
Made, but Key months to develop recommendations for organizing existing EPA personnel
Questions on and resources into the central information office. Nonetheless, EPA has not
yet developed an information plan that identifies the office’s goals,
Resources and objectives, and outcomes. Although agency officials acknowledge the
Strategies Remain importance of developing such a plan, they have not established any
milestones for doing so. While EPA has made progress in determining the
Unresolved organizational structure of the office, final decisions have not been made
and EPA has not yet identified the employees and the resources that will be
needed. Setting up the organizational structure prior to developing an
Page 2 GAO/T-RCED-99-177
information plan runs the risk that the organization will not contain the
resources or structure needed to accomplish its goals.
Information Plan Is Although EPA has articulated both a vision as well as key goals for its new
Needed information office, it has not yet developed an information plan to show
how the agency intends to achieve its vision and goals. Given the many
important and complex issues on information management, policy, and
technology that face the new office, it will be extremely important for EPA
to establish a clear set of priorities and resources needed to accomplish
them. Such information is also essential for EPA to develop realistic
budgetary estimates for the office.
EPA has indicated that it intends to develop an information plan for the
agency that will provide a better mechanism to effectively and efficiently
plan its information and technology investments on a multiyear basis. This
plan will be coordinated with EPA ‘s agencywide strategic plan, prepared
under the Government Performance and Results Act. EPA intends for the
plan to reflect the results of its initiative to improve coordination among
the agency’s major activities relating to information on environment and
program outcomes. It has not yet, however, developed any milestones or
target dates for initiating or completing either the plan or the coordination
initiative.
Organizational Structure Is In early December 1998, the EPA Administrator approved a broad
Not Yet Determined framework for the new information office and set a goal of completing the
reorganization during the summer of 1999. Under the framework approved
by the EPA Administrator, the new office will have three organizational
units responsible for (1) information policy and collection, (2) information
technology and services, and (3) information analysis and access,
respectively. In addition, three smaller units will provide support in areas
such as data quality and strategic planning.
A transition team of EPA staff has been tasked with developing
recommendations for the new office’s mission and priorities as well as its
detailed organizational and reporting structure. In developing these
recommendations, the transition team has consulted with the states,
regulated industries, and other stakeholders to exchange views regarding
the vision, goals, priorities, and initial projects for the office.
Page 3 GAO/T-RCED-99-177
One of the transition team’s key responsibilities is to make
recommendations concerning which EPA units should move into the
information office and in which of the three major organizational units
they should go. To date, the transition team has not finalized its
recommendations on these issues or on how the new office will operate
and the staff it will need.
Needed Resources Are Still Even though EPA has not yet determined which staff will be moved to the
Unknown central information office, the transition team’s director told us that it is
expected that the office will have about 350 employees. She said that the
staffing needs of the office will be met by moving existing employees in
EPA units affected by the reorganization. The director said that, once the
transition team recommends which EPA units will become part of the
central office, the agency will determine which staff will be assigned to the
office. She added that staffing decisions will be completed by July 1999
and the office will begin functioning sometime in August 1999.
The funding needs of the new office were not specified in EPA’s fiscal year
2000 budget request to the Congress because the agency did not have
sufficient information on them when the request was submitted in
February 1999. The director of the transition team told us that in June 1999
the agency will identify the anticipated resources that will transfer to the
new office from various parts of EPA. The agency plans to prepare the
fiscal year 2000 operating plan for the office in October 1999, when EPA has
a better idea of the resources needed to accomplish the responsibilities
that the office will be tasked with during its first year of operation. The
transition team’s director told us that decisions on budget allocations are
particularly difficult to make at the present time due to the sensitive
nature of notifying managers of EPA’s various components that they may
lose funds and staff to the new office.
Furthermore, EPA will soon need to prepare its budget for fiscal year 2001.
According to EPA officials, the Office of the Chief Financial Officer will
coordinate a planning strategy this spring that will lead to the fiscal year
2001 annual performance plan and proposed budget, which will be
submitted to the Office of Management and Budget by September 1999.
Page 4 GAO/T-RCED-99-177
The idea of a centralized information office within EPA has been met with
EPA’s New enthusiasm in many corners—not only by state regulators, but also by
Information Office representatives of regulated industries, environmental advocacy groups,
Will Face Significant and others. Although the establishment of this office is seen as an
important step in improving how EPA collects, manages, and disseminates
Challenges information, the office will face many challenges, some of which have
thwarted previous efforts by EPA to improve its information management
activities. On the basis of our prior and ongoing work, we believe that the
agency must address these challenges for the reorganization to
significantly improve EPA’s information management activities. Among the
most important of these challenges are (1) obtaining sufficient resources
and expertise to address the complex information management issues
facing the agency; (2) overcoming problems associated with EPA’s
decentralized organizational structure, such as the lack of agencywide
information dissemination policies; (3) balancing the demand for more
data with calls from the states and regulated industries to reduce reporting
burdens; and (4) working effectively with EPA’s counterparts in state
government.
Obtaining Sufficient The new organizational structure will offer EPA an opportunity to better
Resources and Expertise coordinate and prioritize its information initiatives. The EPA Administrator
and the senior-level officials charged with creating the new office have
expressed their intentions to make fundamental improvements in how the
agency uses information to carry out its mission to protect human health
and the environment. They likewise recognize that the reorganization will
raise a variety of complex information policy and technology issues.
To address the significant challenges facing EPA, the new office will need
significant resources and expertise. EPA anticipates that the new office will
substantially improve the agency’s information management activities,
rather than merely centralize existing efforts to address information
management issues. Senior EPA officials responsible for creating the new
office anticipate that the information office will need “purse strings
control” over the agency’s resources for information management
expenditures in order to implement its policies, data standards,
procedures, and other decisions agencywide. For example, one official
told us that the new office should be given veto authority over the
development or modernization of data systems throughout EPA.
To date, the focus of efforts to create the office has been on what the
agency sees as the more pressing task of determining which organizational
Page 5 GAO/T-RCED-99-177
components and staff members should be transferred into the new office.
While such decisions are clearly important, EPA also needs to determine
whether its current information management resources, including staff
expertise, are sufficient to enable the new office to achieve its goals.
Overcoming Problems EPA will need to provide the new office with sufficient authority to
Associated With EPA’s overcome organizational obstacles to adopt agencywide information
Decentralized policies and procedures. As we reported last September, EPA has not yet
developed policies and procedures to govern key aspects of its projects to
Organizational Structure disseminate information, nor has it developed standards to assess the
data’s accuracy and mechanisms to determine and correct errors.1
Because EPA does not have agencywide polices regarding the
dissemination of information, program offices have been making their
own, sometimes conflicting decisions about the types of information to be
released and the extent of explanations needed about how data should be
interpreted. Likewise, although the agency has a quality assurance
program, there is not yet a common understanding across the agency of
what data quality means and how EPA and its state partners can most
effectively ensure that the data used for decision-making and/or
disseminated to the public is of high quality. To address such issues, EPA
plans to create a Quality Board of senior managers within the new office in
the summer of 1999.
Although EPA acknowledges its need for agencywide policies governing
information collection, management, and dissemination, it continues to
operate in a decentralized fashion that heightens the difficulty of
developing and implementing agencywide procedures. EPA’s offices have
been given the responsibility and authority to develop and manage their
own data systems for the nearly 30 years since the agency’s creation.
Given this history, overcoming the potential resistance to centralized
policies may be a serious challenge to the new information office.
Balancing the Need to EPA and its state partners in implementing environmental programs have
Collect More Data and collected a wealth of environmental data under various statutory and
Efforts to Reduce regulatory authorities. However, important gaps in the data exist. For
example, EPA has limited data that are based on (1) the monitoring of
Reporting Burdens environmental conditions and (2) the exposures of humans to toxic
1
Environmental Information: Agencywide Policies and Procedures Are Needed for EPA’s Information
Dissemination (GAO/RCED-98-245, Sept. 24, 1998).
Page 6 GAO/T-RCED-99-177
pollutants. Furthermore, the human health and ecological effects of many
pollutants are not well understood. EPA also needs comprehensive
information on environmental conditions and their changes over time to
identify problem areas that are emerging or that need additional regulatory
action or other attention.
In contrast to the need for more and better data is a call from states and
regulated industries to reduce data management and reporting burdens.
EPA has recently initiated some efforts in this regard. For example, an
EPA/state information management workgroup looking into this issue has
proposed an approach to assess environmental information and data
reporting requirements based on the value of the information compared to
the cost of collecting, managing, and reporting it. EPA has announced that
in the coming months, its regional offices and the states will be exploring
possibilities for reducing paperwork requirements for EPA’s programs,
testing specific initiatives in consultation with EPA’s program offices, and
establishing a clearinghouse of successful initiatives and pilot projects.
However, overall reductions in reporting burdens have proved difficult to
achieve. For example, in March 1996, we reported that while EPA was
pursuing a paperwork reduction of 20 million hours, its overall paperwork
burden was actually increasing because of changes in programs and other
factors.2 The states and regulated industries have indicated that they will
look to EPA’s new office to reduce the burden of reporting requirements.
Working More Effectively Although both EPA and the states have recognized the value in fostering a
With State Counterparts strong partnership concerning information management, they also
recognize that this will be a challenging task both in terms of policy and
technical issues. For example, the states vary significantly in terms of the
data they need to manage their environmental programs, and such
differences have complicated the efforts of EPA and the states to develop
common standards to facilitate data sharing. The task is even more
challenging given that EPA’s various information systems do not use
common data standards. For example, an individual facility is not
identified by the same code in different systems.
Given that EPA depends on state regulatory agencies to collect much of the
data it needs and to help ensure the quality of that data, EPA recognizes the
need to work in a close partnership with the states on a wide variety of
2
Environmental Protection: Assessing EPA’s Progress in Paperwork Reduction (GAO/T-RCED-96-107,
March 21, 1996).
Page 7 GAO/T-RCED-99-177
information management activities, including the creation of its new
information office. Some partnerships have already been created. For
example, EPA and the states are reviewing reporting burdens to identify
areas in which the burden can be reduced or eliminated. Under another
EPA initiative, the agency is working with states to create data standards so
that environmental information from various EPA and state databases can
be more readily shared. Representatives of state environmental agencies
and the Environmental Council of the States have expressed their ideas
and concerns about the role of EPA’s new information office and have
frequently reminded EPA that they expect to share with EPA the
responsibility for setting that office’s goals, priorities, and strategies.
According to a Council official, the states have had more input to the
development of the new EPA office than they typically have had in other
major policy issues and the states view this change as an improvement in
their relationship with EPA.
Collecting and managing the data that EPA requires to manage its programs
Observations have been major long-term challenges for the agency. The EPA
Administrator’s recent decision to create a central information office to
make fundamental agencywide improvements in data management
activities is a step in the right direction. However, creating such an
organization from disparate parts of the agency is a complex process and
substantially improving and integrating EPA’s information systems will be
difficult and likely require several years. To fully achieve EPA’s goals will
require high priority within the agency, including the long-term
appropriate resources and commitment of senior management.
(160489) Page 8 GAO/T-RCED-99-177
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